Good job, humans

A little thought I had a while back which I never got around to sharing: 

So, the world is an absolute mess of political upheaval, on the surface and behind the scenes. As humans we are brutal - neglecting the poor, the vulnerable and the environment, and attacking each other physically and emotionally every second of everyday. Violence and greed are our default settings, with anger and frustration leaking into nearly every interaction we seem to have as an existence. We breach each other’s rights, we lie and manipulate, and we refuse to end wars. Everything is chaos. Everything is shitty. All of the time.

And then – you’ll be walking down the street, and you’ll see a perfect building. It has been constructed out of carefully made stone bricks, which were quarried and shaped before being shipped and sold. It sounds crazy but - people learned how to design that building, and others learned how to build it. Each woman or man became an expert in their trade, and then the cement was mixed and the bricks were placed together so they were perfectly straight and geometrically regular. It was done so precisely, so slowly…so painstakingly carefully. It’s beautiful. We did that. Humans did that. Good job, humans!

But how incredible is it that we’re in the midst of this constant existential crisis and collectively we can’t keep control; everything is a mess. Right? We’re destroying the planet piece by piece and as we do so we’re destroying each other… and then, in the middle of all this – you have these moments of creative perfection. Where humanity has come together, forgotten the rest, and made something. They talked, they decided, they ordered, they made, and they built. And not just walls, and not just architecture – it’s everywhere. From products on the shelves in supermarkets to dance shows, there are tiny synced pieces of life which, aside from the outside perspectives, are completely brilliant.

It is like a superficial layer of order lain carefully over the chaos. A little piece of sanity to hide the screaming feelings of crazy.

 Is that not kind of sickeningly beautiful?

Heartache and anger

OK so I posted in the University of Birmingham student group about this, but I feel I needed to write out the full story. It got me so worked up and angry.

So today I was going to Aldi to get food, as I do every week. Outside there is a lady who sells the big issue, and like most people I don’t buy it very often (I’ve only bought two this year.) Never the less I always try and say hi and be polite when asked, and make conversation, and today when I did that the lady ( regrettably never asked her name) asked me very quietly if I could buy some food for her children.

Now, most people would politely decline at this point, but I’ve always been bad at saying no. It was probably because of this, as opposed to me being a particularly good person, that she then accompanied me into the shop. I told her I couldn’t buy much because I was a student, but she just seemed invigorated from even being in the store - she hesitantly asked if she could get chicken, and I said that was OK. After that I asked if she wanted any vegetables, to which she lit up and asked me if I was sure. She only got some potatoes, and then lastly some chocolate for her kids - She was hesitant and awkward the whole time. The food in total only came to a fiver – not exactly a lot.

I admit that stereotypes of homeless people came into my head throughout this - was she really homeless, did she really have children, etc., etc. But she was a legitimate Big Issue vendor, and after all, I'd bought her food, not drugs. When I’d bought my own food and come back out, she thanked me again. I asked her about her situation and she explained in broken English that she's from Bosnia, and she has four children: one 3, one 4, one 9 and one 12. They don’t go to school because she can’t afford to send them. Her husband is dead and she can’t get a proper job; she’d been living on the streets, sometimes sleeping in the church. She was sleeping in a park with her kids when a lady asked her what she was doing, and took pity on her. Currently she is staying in a room in this lady’s house, who also took her to The Big Issue and got her the job. However, she explained that she can only stay if she pays the rent for the room.

She started to cry as she told me how she wasn’t selling enough, and how she was going to have to move out of the room. She explained that she was trying to do everything for her children, and I realised the real impact of the meal I had just given her. I felt like a terrible person for even considering for a minute that she was a scam. She said, rough quote, ‘I have had too much hardship. God has given me too much. I just want it to end.’ She showed me the ten magazines she hadn’t yet managed to sell, and the bus ticket she’d bought from the city centre which had cost her four pounds. She said it almost wasn’t worth coming out at all, but at least she had the job.

I tried to say that most people did care, deep down,  as we watched them all avoid eye contact and walk past us with their bags full of Aldi food. I said they would help more if they knew people’s story, if they stopped to think about the fact there were literally lives at stake. All she said to this was that she didn’t beg, and she mostly didn’t try and tell anyone her hardship because she didn’t want to be like that. She said ‘some people come by smiling’ – she didn’t want to ruin their day with her pain. She says she just has to wait and see if anyone has a good heart, and then God will bless them a thousand times for their kindness.

When she asked about me I didn’t want to tell her anything, not with all the privileges I take for granted every day. I was embarrassed about my own status in society, about my comparative richness. All I said was that I was a student at the university, to which she nodded – we are from completely different worlds. She blessed me and my family and I told her to try and keep up hope (and felt like a complete arsehole doing so). As I came away, all I could think of was of those people who were walking past us, and how twenty must have come out of the shop since we’d been talking. If half of them, even in that five minutes, had forked out £2.50 for a magazine (less than a pint of beer), she’d have made her quota for the day. I’m not saying that would have solved all of her problems, but it wouldn’t exactly have hindered, would it?

We’re ruthlessly blinkered. We don’t like to think about poverty so we literally, physically look away, and try to act as though it doesn’t exist. We tell ourselves we’re good people and we have morals, that we’re kind, but think about it. Are we? No. No one gives enough of a shit about anyone but themselves and their own lives. Society is a load of bullshit.

All I can beg of you, reader, is that you look up from your phone screen – from your apps, social media accounts – for just a moment, and have a look around. What can you do to make someone’s life better? What can you do to make someone else smile? What even minuscule thing could you do to make a difference to this shitty world?

Grateful

I don’t usually make posts like this but I feel people need reminding.

 It’s nearly Christmas: you’re stressing over what to buy for your families, over the lack of snow, about exams and work and deadlines, about which days you can take off and which days you really can’t, about how freaking cold it is and how dark it gets in the afternoons, about Christmas day plans and how much all of this is going to cost.

I just want to remind you how fragile life is, and how anything can happen at any moment – to any of us. Life is miserable at times and definitely, always unpredictable; pain is something every person has experienced and something everyone will experience again, at some point. People die, people fall out of love, people lose their jobs, people get injured or sick – bad things happen, literally all the time, everywhere on this earth.  There’s a war going on in Syria, and on the 25^th of December there will be broken families huddled in shelters, with no food but just the fear of another bomb, or another raid from the rebels. They’ve seen pain, loads of it, but do you know what they’ll do? Mothers will kiss the faces of their surviving children and thank the sky for sparing them their lives. They’ve seen pain, but they know how lucky they are to have any hope at all.

But, I don’t say this to dampen your festive spirit, or to add any more stress to your life - in fact, quite the opposite. Don’t you think it is a beautiful miracle to have the people you love around you this Christmas? Shouldn’t you feel blessed to have your family and your closest friends with you, grateful to able to smile and laugh together? You’ll most likely be surrounded by people you’ve known forever, and who you love unconditionally (even though they’re family and you fight like cats and dogs).  They’ll be gathered around the dinner table and slumped sleepily in armchairs eating chocolate, most likely in relatively good health.  Some alive after an admirable amount of years, after wars – some who’ve fought off diseases, both physical and psychological – and you’ll all be together this Christmas. There can surely be nothing more wonderful.

 Life can take people away in seconds, and bad things are going to happen to you in your life. But that’s not a reason to be unhappy. Good things happen too, and life always gives more than it takes, if you look at it from the right angle. Please just have a look around and be thankful for everything you have!

Merry Christmas.

Dystopian outlook

In the future, money will cease to exist. We can now pay with our laptops, on our phones and with contactless cards; there will be no need for physical currency, because technology will take over. Efficiency always was our weakness. But the transferring of money is still founded on the concept of it; when we lay our plastic bank cards against the card machine as payment, we still imagine those coins exchanging hands, and think of it as a trade of physical money.

Soon it seems we will be living on concepts and relying on them. Reality will be no more, but we will still have the concept of reality: imagination and artificial creation. The world will morph into one big game of pretend, with an electronic barrier between us and life. We'll devote ourselves to robots instead of real, beating hearts, machines over freshly mown grass. iPads replace books, apps replace games, technology replaces life. Only in our minds as an ideal will the world survive; only in these warped caricatures will the living, breathing world continue on. Society will be so fake it will no longer recognise itself in the mirror, but will step back and say "damn Daniel, back at it again with the pollution, the Botox, and the online dating."

Will anything be real? Perhaps the sense of loss will be real. Perhaps the increase in people with severe mental health problems and the loneliness will be real. Perhaps all else will be fake apart from that empty, aching feeling inside which screams that this is wrong, that this goes against our nature. I can't go five minutes without having my phone in my hand, checking it even when I'm not expecting any news, aimlessly scrolling through it subconsciously. I hate this so much I want to take a sledgehammer to it and smash it up, until the glass and the metal are little more than dust in my hands. But I can't. Why not? Because the entire fucking world is the same, contaminated and obsessed, like we've been sucked into a dark hole and we can't see to get ourselves out. Like the lotus eaters we barely even know we are having our lives wasted away, our energy drained out of us; we are oblivious to our own destruction. Humans are so strong, so adaptable and incredible; nothing can destroy us because we dominate the earth. 

But of course, we will destroy ourselves. When every human is dead and God walks among our technology ridden corpses he will mutter "my god, whose idea was it to give them free will." 

Grades

And now I stand here, branded for life by letters which do not take into consideration circumstance or personality. This group of letters, collected together after years, will now stand to reflect my intelligence and my work ethic. They show what I can do. They show what I can’t do. They determine my future - they represent me. I will be left with these letters for life.

I feel these letters are like covers to novels. Sometimes, I’m sure they represent exactly what they’re supposed to. You see an A* cover, you open it, and there is the life of an A* student, there in black and white. But also, they can misrepresent. If you open the book, you may find things you never expected to. Behind a D grade student, there may be unspoken hardships you hadn’t anticipated, invisible broken relationships or pain that is unimaginable. There is no way to tell a person’s story with a simple letter. There is no way to pour humanity into a man made symbol, to whittle life down to a mere grade.

There is no other system. It has to be like this – there has to be some regime that evens everything out, ignores the majority of factors, and puts everyone in the same boat so that they are comparable to one another. I understand this, because this system makes up the fundamental backbone of our working society. But it still doesn’t make it any way right. When a kid is born into a working class family with six brothers and sisters and barely enough food to make it through the day gets bullied for five years because of his hand-me-down clothes, and then gets judged by the same letters as a middle class, well-educated only child whose only hardship in life was his iphone’s battery life – IS. THIS. FAIR?

Well, life’s not fair. But it’s not just to do with money and class. It’s to do with unforeseen situations and other factors which cannot be taken into consideration when they make that A or B, or C, or U official to everyone. Life is something we don’t understand – it is complicated beyond belief. We are beating hearts and blinking eyes, whirring brains and chattering teeth, and each of us splashes a path across the globe, interweaving with other paths and situations and events.  Words and memory spiral from this and history is made; emotions play their song. The future envelopes out in front of us….unknown, not understood, but we take steps towards it anyway because there is nothing else to do but trust. And yet, despite all this complicated craziness, this blast of bizarre brains brought together by some big bang, we label our letters. We reduce our lives down to such simplicity, that sometimes I think we miss the entire point of life itself. If there is a point indeed.

Some will think me bitter for writing this - would I be writing this if I'd got the grades I wanted? Perhaps not.  But it is not just for me that I pose this unwinnable argument. It is for all those people who got letters on their pieces of paper who feel they have a different story to one of laziness or stupidity. Whatever life is, it is more than that. 

Wavering in the past, the present, the future and the imagination

What is the planet? What is the world? What is the solar system? What is this life? What are these intakes of breath, billion upon billions of them, every day?  What are the colours? What is the sky? What are the lives and the thoughts and the beating hearts? Who are they beating for – what are they beating for? What is the mind, what is the soul; what is psychological pain? What is sadness when it is heavy like rocks, what is joy when it lifts you to the edge of the universe? What is a journey, what are these words, why am I writing, why are you reading? How does your brain work – isn’t It beautiful? Isn't the way your fingers bend and the way you blink fascinating, the way your toes quiver, the way your insides squirm. The way no knowledge will ever be enough, the way we wonder and wonder. What is my purpose? My goal? My belief? I am intrinsically linked to the point of restlessness with something that I cannot comprehend. I’ve struck a chord in some dimension that no one even knows about. My life is spent wavering in the past, the present, the future and the imagination; spent half in mind and half in action, questioning things more than anyone could know. Thinking of things and feeling hopelessness, because as humans, it’s hard sometimes not to feel hopelessness when we’ve been presented with life, following each other, leading it, accepting it, and not questioning it. It shakes me, like a harrowing storm, to think so deep; ‘tis safer to stay on dry land: “life’s more painless, for the brainless.” But my mind, she has a mind of her own; I am filled with craziness; everything I touch, like skittles, turns to something odd, something strange, something perhaps ruined. Ruined in the eyes of the beholder, blundering my way through life, wondering if ever I will grasp what is to me an understanding. But we, as human, as simple masters of ourselves and yet brainless, stupid, insignificant nothings, created this word “understanding.” We placed letters together; we learned the concept; we shared the concept. But how is it a word, when understanding does not exist? Everything that you know, that you think you know, is not real. Potentially, none of this is real. None but pain, because that is blinding yet enlightening to the point where it can never fail, walking hand in hand with fear and hate to destroy us all. I have faith in humanity, yet I weep for humanity…I fail to “understand” humanity. I fail to understand myself, or what it is that we plan to do, to enjoy, to cry, to weep, to die. To keep on moving forward, ‘til tears have been shed for eternity, babies have been born ‘til the end of time and things have shifted beyond anything we in this snapshot of time, of this thing we call time, could know. Time, time, time, you slip away, you leave us; where do you go? Is there an intergalactic storage centre in the core of nature, of natural comprehension, where the time goes? Does it frolic amongst meadows, does it sing, does it feel emotion? Is it like sand from a sand timer; will we run out of it, before we run out of air? How do you explain things such as time which are real and fundamental but do not truly exist? How to define what it is to spend time, like it is currency, something you can own. No one owns time, time is unownable; time is in itself a Houdini, a terrific performer; an escapist. I’m taking your time, taking it, right now; as if time can be taken, as if time can be told. As if time has been old and young and born and shall die again. Where am I going with this? That’s not the question, for it seems we have no destination; the word destination is just as made up, just as fake, as what it represents. As false as our metaphors, as our similes, of our allusions. A hopeless destination: perhaps I should be filled with utter gloom, perhaps you’re feeling now like I have overstepped the mark; I have questioned too much. But there is no gloom; there is no need for comprehension, or destination. Enjoy the colours, the sky, the emotion, the air, the time, the feelings that shake your soul, the actions that clear your mind, the movements that evoke thought and happiness. Contentment is in those that accept defeat in all understanding and just wonder, and feel joy in something that is entirely out of reach. World - you are truly wonderful. 

Unreachable

Our society is proudly marching in the complete wrong direction in a multitude of ways, and everyone is too busy playing on their smart phones to notice. I look around so often and ask, why is everything just so fucked up? There are so many things about our modern culture that just don't make any sense at all, but we all just go along with it, because who is the individual to question the majority? We judge, bully, reject and kill, we torture and starve, rape and neglect. Addicted to unreachable perfection, falling short every time because nothing is realistic or accepted. Everything is prejudged and judged. We crave brands to be accepted and we lie to be loved. We lie to ourselves, even though we know that everyone else is lying as well. The world is just full of lies, in marketing education, and politics. Boys are allowed to waltz around and treat girls like they're worthless, and most of our music is just misogynistic bullshit that we eagerly lap up because it has a nice beat and of course, because everyone else is doing it.  

Did you waltz into the fire?

The day has ended, we are into the night; the strands of daylight whisked away and replaced by an unseeable black, which covers all in bright darkness. What have you achieved? How have you used your hours awake? Did you smell the breath of the sea as you dived off a cliff into the swirling ocean? Did you ride a muscular horse bareback as he galloped roughly through the desert, clinging to his mane? Did you understand someone and see who they really are; did you glance inside their soul and view the true definition of your complicated relationship? Or did you fall madly in love with someone whom you should for everything it's worth despise, but their beautiful eyes just got you and you felt some crazy urge to kiss them? Did you learn a true and unyielding fact that blew your brain into helpless smithereens, and left you begging for life to make sense again? Did you break a promise, walk away from a commitment, or make a devastating change? Did you steal someone's glory, did you bask in some form of shame, did you walk a tight tight rope across someone's conscience? Did you make some small correction, or alter some small fear; did you make some small objection or did you waltz into a fire? Did you use this day, this God given day and the life you have been blessed with? Or did this day, like the others, get snatched away by your immediate and dominant pleasures, as you watched things pass you by, miserably moping on account of nothing happening? Use the day and your humanity as you take the air from this planet like gold from a piggy bank; make all the pain worthwhile, because this calm and pleasant contentment and this glorious beautiful world is there for you, when you're ready for it. Make the next day and the next the ones that count.   

From a lonely green stem

I stare out into the shadows, which come and go like ebbing black waters, lapping at my feet. My hands clenched tight to my sides, I decide whether to sprint or walk or die. When I run, I shall fall. Down, ripping skin from my palms and my knees, drawing blood from my beaten body and crushing me into the earth. My tears shall soak into the bloody ground but-

I shall laugh until my lungs burn, because the flowers will grow now. They shall feel their way through the misty darkness and push up through the oppressive dirt. They will penetrate the muddy ground and reach up with curling hand-like stems to the sky, never once seeing the sun in their pursuit, but hoping for it, and that is all that ever mattered.

Then, they will blossom. And I, in this shadowy place, watched by fantastically judgmental eyes, will look to them. They unravel their petals, opening up to the world, ready to embark upon their life after being a trapped, tiny seed caged within the ground. I will run among them, on them, they will push me forward, with their colours and their faces turned towards the not always visible sun. It's there, they'll shout. Keep running. Keep running.

The clouds will rage with angry rumbles across the dark sky, but the flowers of the night will grow with the rain that pours forth, and taller and taller they'll grow. Strength in their numbers, beauty in their strength, they will be with me until the seasons change, and we all return into the ground. But we'll be happy with our successes, because we kept running, kept moving forward, never laying down in defeat in the dark rain.

Listen to the flowers as they accept your heavenly tears. Listen to their voices as they travel towards the air above, unaware that life exists, but hoping that something is up there, with instinct their only companion. They live for only a moment here on earth, and you too have only a moment in comparison. Have the strength to feel your way blind as that lonely green stem. Have the belief that you will find the sun and be able to blossom just as nature had wanted.  

Red lights

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Desperate eyes calling for your attention, but not truly wanting it; defiant humiliation, naked embarrassment leaking through every look, every glance. But cold stares hiding fear and expressing false love conceal all, begging to be believed. And the men, they fall for it, like they've been shot by cupids from burning hell, they turn to those with nothing like nothing at all is wrong. Crisp paper makes for morals and all the world is of course reality. 

With God-made bodies pressed up against the glass, they entice what will keep them alive, masters of a desperate trade always to exist and always to be judged. Perhaps with children to feed, they must stand under the stares and look back, strong. Just a tool, a method of pleasure, to be used as if they are worthless, but yet they must be strong. Though even the strongest and the most experienced have eyes that flash with fury at the world, at themselves for standing sentinel to their stupid, sickening profession. Respect is false, love is false, their happiness and livelihoods are false.

All read in a glance, a quick peek through the glass at a pretty woman striking a sexy pose, looking back as if she seeps normality. But under the surface, desperation lurks like a sickening overwhelming disease, pulsating through the streets and through the very hearts of the fearful females. When you've hit the true depths of disaster, where do you go? To the place with the red lights, to the whore's death row.

Journalism

“Louise, have you considered journalism?”

Simplistic though it sounds, this is a very complex question. The truth is, I have considered it. But this is probably not the answer they were expecting.

Journalism is just the manipulation of the public. It is an incredibly powerful force that is very often misused, as it can spark emotion and action in almost anybody. The power of words is such that it can cause death and destruction, anger and upset, or love and hate. It can twist things, brainwashing the public into believing what they are wanted to believe, cruelly misleading people into taking up different views.

It can be harsh, drastic and devastating, with cold hearted words causing suicide, or glorification throwing people into fame only to gleefully rip them to pieces months later. It is a place of greed, scandal and opinions which aims to mould the public like dough, and the sad thing is the majority don't even realise they are being fooled. They are spoon fed views and ideas, spitting them out on social networking sites and to their neighbours, following each other like sheep.

It angers me when I see these articles in the papers and I feel like I cannot believe a word that is being said, but it also fascinates me. The majority will sponge it up and it will be seen as truth, and the writer will be patted on the back for doing such a good job. How can the world be like this? It is not wrong to voice your opinions, so therefore this can never be disallowed. People will be forever humiliated on front page news, and disrespected in evil articles, which can inspire such hatred and misery against those who it is aimed at. Words are so much more powerful than people think, and you can do almost anything with them.

I often wonder, when I see an exposing article on a celebrity’s life, where did the crook who wrote this start out? Were they asked the same question? Did someone ask them if they had considered journalism, as they gazed innocently out from behind a school desk?

Racism rant

This is my first rant...and I regret to say that it has not been sparked in anyway itself, I had to stoop to the floor and create the fire manually, because it seems utterly pointless that this blog is called “the ranty shorts” when I have no rants to offer you. I'll talk about one of the things that has always, and will always bother me: racism.

So, racism. We should all, I know, be like Atticus Finch on this one ( if you don't know who that is, you pain me, go and read the best book of all time) but, we live in the 21^st century and we are supposed to be the most intelligent and most advanced our species has ever been...but still there are so many who judge people on the colour of their skin or the race they belong to. It honestly baffles me how people can actually be that stupid. Like, really, do you have a brain? How does skin colour affect a person's behaviour, actions, the way they function? How can it make them different in any way other than appearance?

Fear – fear of the unknown. Fear of something different, something that is unlike what we are surrounded by. That is what sparks it all and what allows us to create these disastrous prejudices that have the ability to tear our world apart. People are flawed within themselves and insecure, so they pick out a minority and target them. When in doubt, blame the foreigner, because the foreigner can do little to retaliate, and there is safety in numbers when everyone looks and acts the same.

But, people need to open their eyes. Diversity is not a hindrance, it is a blessing. Were we all the same not only would we all die – natural selection – but the world would be a dull, grey, boring place with no happiness or thriving colour brought by the differences and spontaneous joy of our race. It is just an excuse, we all need insight to see that. These people need a scapegoat for their own problems, or the societal problems, and those they are wary of, because of their unfamiliar faces or practices, are the ones to take the hit. It wasn't fair in the 1900's and with our new, intelligent and scientific approach to life, it certainly isn't fair now.

It's not just race, it's all kinds of differences. People are cruel because it is in their nature to do so, so this almost cannot be helped. But it is sad to see the larger vultures as they prey upon the weak, despite the fact nature made them that way. We need to become 21^st century people, not prehistoric beasts who fear that which they don't know or are not accustomed to. The vulture could be trained, eventually given time, to be vegetarian. We must train our next generations to eliminate racism and these absurd prejudices instilled in us since ancient times, because we have no need for them now. We are all a ball of mangled guts stuffed inside an exterior of skin, and we will all die, every one of us, just a corpse in the end (rather like my friend Shakespeare mentions through Shylock).

I've surely not said anything you haven't already heard...to be honest I'm not really sure what I have said, all I've done is type angrily at the keyboard until I have come to this point. It just frustrates me so much, the racism, the judging, but also the fact that it will always be like that, and there's pretty much nothing we can do about it. I can talk of training generations, but there will always be those with selfish intentions, who need someone to blame to purge themselves of guilt. What is my message? I'm making you think, that's all. Think about how messed up we as humans can be. And I'm done.